Now Showing in Barcelona…

With the holidays behind us, we wanted to recap what we were up to last month.

For those of you who don’t know her, Vitruvian instructor Melinda Whitmore is multi-talented: she draws, she paints, she’s our resident expert in human musculoskeletal anatomy… and she’s even a sought-after floral designer.

But she’s also a fierce sculptor. In the time it would take me just to build an armature, Mindy can crank out a finished figure sculpture entirely from her imagination – no model required. She’s really good at it, and so it’s gratifying when her ability gets recognized.

That happened recently when her figure sculpture dyad Suspension was accepted to appear in Figurativas, the annual figurative art exhibition at the Museu Europeu d’Art Modern (MEAM) in Barcelona. This is a big deal because the exhibition was juried by some of the most prominent and influential artists alive today, including Odd Nerdrum and Antonio López García.

When Mindy got word that her work would be included in the show, we both thought the same thing: That sounds like a great excuse to visit Barcelona! So we spent a week there in early December to attend the show’s opening.

The show didn’t disappoint. There was a ton of very strong representational work exhibited, including drawings, paintings and sculptures, most of it depicting the human figure in some way. The entries were from all over the world, with some real diversity of styles and technique. We enjoyed our time looking at the work, and learned a couple of things, too. Seeing well-executed artwork always brings surprises – things you notice about how it was made that just don’t come through in photographs or catalogs.

The exhibition will stay up until the end of January, so If you happen to be in Barcelona before then and want to see some really great contemporary figurative artwork, go take a look!

If you can’t make it to see the show in person, below a video walkthrough of the exhibition. Of course, you can also study with Melinda directly via her Vitruvian Studio online course, Anatomy of the Face.